ASUS 970 Pro Gaming/Aura Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 18.04.16Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| At a first glance the 970 Pro Gaming/Aura leaves a good impression. You get a reasonable feature mix and it won't take long until you realize that ASUS created a product, which is to be available at a reasonable price. There is a decent power design and the absence of overclocking features, makes it clear that this board will end up with a decent price tag. In terms of storage connectivity there are six angled SATA connectors, an M.2 slot and USB 3.1, which makes this board compatible with a vast variety of storage devices. In case of the color scheme we find a red and black, which is very common these days. | -
Design - Layout - Features - M.2 x2 Slot |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS's Layout is well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors, of which there are six. Unfortunately there are no power and reset buttons and there is also no CLR-CMOS button, which in the end is reasonable, since ASUS is not targeting overclockers, enthusiasts or gamers with this motherboard. We want to underline that this board features great storage versatility, since there is SATA as well as M.2 support. Furthermore the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots is well thought an therefore nothing needs to be criticized at this point. There are for example two slots between the first and the second PCI-Express x16 slot. Should you decide to build an SLI/CrossFire setup, then the first card will still be able to get plenty of fresh air. Another thing that is good with this board is the fact, that there as plenty of space between the CPU socket and the heatsinks on the power design as well as between the CPU socket and the DIMM slots. With this particular board ASUS also offers their so called AURA backlighting feature, which indirectly illuminated the southbridge. Using the AURA software in Windows you can change the color from within Windows to anything you'd like. We really like this feature, but unfortunately there are other LEDs on the board as well, where the color cannot be changed. We would like if it was possible to change the color of these LEDs as well. | - Space around the CPU socket - AURA | - No power/reset-button onboard - No Debug LED | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks 2nd. When taking the average of all 3D results this board manages to score again the same 2nd place. Overall performance is competitive. Having a look at power consumption we see that this board is also perfectly in line. | - Power consumption | - Power Consumption - 3D Performance |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASUS has put a lot of time and effort into making their BIOS look nicer and more user friendly. Especially when we compare this version of ASUS BIOS to the first UEFI BIOS from ASUS, it simply cannot be compared, since the two are worlds apart. What's almost self-explanatory is that you get a lot of tuning and tweaking options in order to optimize the system towards your needs. We also like the entry screen which displays a lot of useful information. Apart from that overclocking our test CPU to 5.0 GHz was straight forward and there were no issues whatsoever. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ASUS 970 Pro Gaming/Aura is a reasonably equipped AMD motherboard, based on AMD's 970 chipset. Apart from that the price is very competitively chosen at only 86 Euro. Nevertheless we would like to see the onboard lighting feature improved. | -
Price
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Gaming - Overclocking - Enthusiasts |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS 970 Pro Gaming/Aura good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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